Nadir Shah's Invasion and Sack of Delhi
By the 1730s the Mughal Empire had been hollowed out by the failure of the jagirdari revenue system, which required continuous territorial expansion to fund the mansabdar nobility. When expansion halted after Aurangzeb's exhausting Deccan campaigns, jagir assignments fell into arrears and nobles competed violently over revenue rather than serving the empire, while the Marathas, the Nizam of Hyderabad, and other regional powers carved out de facto independence. Nadir Shah of Persia exploited this paralysis. In February 1739 his disciplined army destroyed a far larger Mughal force at the Battle of Karnal, capturing Emperor Muhammad Shah. The Persians then entered Delhi; after rumours of Nadir's death sparked an attack on his troops, he ordered a general massacre (qatl-i-am) in which tens of thousands of inhabitants were killed in a single day. Nadir extracted an immense indemnity and looted the imperial treasury, carrying away the jewelled Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor diamond. The sack of Delhi was a structural watershed: it demonstrated that the Mughal centre could no longer defend itself and stripped away the financial and prestige resources that had sustained imperial authority even after real power had devolved to the provinces. The invasion accelerated the empire's fragmentation, emboldened the Marathas and the rising European trading companies, and reduced the Mughal emperor to a figurehead presiding over a shrinking enclave around Delhi.
- Year: 1739 CE
- Category: Military
